Telephones or phones have profoundly changed many aspects of contemporary society, and have become an increasingly important tool for communicating with others, both for personal and business use. Telephones are available in a wide array of shapes and sizes, operate in variety of ways (e.g., via cells and cell towers, satellites, fiber optics, etc), and may be portable (e.g., cellular phones or mobile phones) or non-portable (e.g., a “landline”).
A telephone is typically associated with a telephone number, and a user signs up for a service plan (e.g., cell phone plan) to be able to use his or her telephone to make and receive telephone calls. Typically, when a caller calls a callee, the callee may answer the incoming call, or may miss the incoming call. If the callee misses the incoming call, the callee may return the missed incoming call by placing an outgoing call to the caller.
Many telephones also include voicemail and caller identification or ID. With voicemail, a caller may be able to record a telephone message for a callee who is not answering his or her telephone. The callee may then listen to the voicemail at his or her convenience, and return the telephone call. The telephone messages are usually ordered based upon the time they were left.
With caller ID, the telephone number associated with an incoming call is displayed to the callee on his or her telephone. The name associated with that telephone number may also be displayed. Thus, this feature may indicate the telephone number associated with an incoming call, as well as the telephone number associated with a missed incoming call from the caller. Based on the missed caller ID information, the callee may the return the caller's telephone call.
Some systems also combine caller ID and voicemail functionality. For example, many voicemail systems also indicate to a callee the telephone number associated with a telephone message that was left for a callee.
Although voicemail and caller ID may allow users to personally know if there are any telephone messages on their phones, and missed telephone calls to be returned, one problem that may arise occurs when the caller makes multiple phone calls to different callees about the same topic. Although each callee may know whether he or she returned the call, they will generally not know whether the other callee has returned the call.
For instance, there are some arrangements, especially in small businesses, where co-workers (e.g., partners) use their own cell phones for business. Consider a real estate agent A and a real estate agent B who are working together, and both of their cell phone numbers are on the for sale signs and on the brochures. Oftentimes, a prospective buyer calls one of them, gets no answer, and then goes on to call the other. As a result, both agents may have missed calls and telephone messages from the potential buyer asking the same question, and both agents will likely return the call. Typically, both agents will listen to their telephone messages in order, and contact the callers in that order. As real estate agent A does not know that a potential buyer also called real estate agent B, and does not know whether real estate agent B already returned the telephone call, real estate agent A may waste his time returning a telephone call that real estate agent B has already returned.
This scenario is common when a partner has been away from his or her phone for a while, for example, with other customers. Upon checking his phone, real estate agent A may often have a list of missed calls and messages to return. If real estate agent A starts listening to the messages and returning calls in the order they were received, he may find that his partner has already responded to many of them, and that real estate agent A has thus wasted his time listening to the message, taking notes, looking up the information, and returning the calls when he could have been processing messages that real estate agent B had not handled. On a larger scale, this scenario may lead to a lot of wasted time, higher costs, and inefficiency.
A need therefore exists in the art for improving telephones, and in particular, a more intelligent approach for organizing telephone messages to enable users to more efficiently return telephone calls.